Preparing food or beverages from flexible packs or containers which comprise the food or beverage ingredients is known in the state of the art, such as per documents WO 99/05044 or WO 2011/024103 for example. These flexible containers or packs have generally the advantage to semi-rigid and rigid containers, typically with the shape of a capsule, that less amount of material is used to pack the product which leads to overall less production costs, to lower life cycle impacts shown in several life-cycle assessments and to advantages on the part of the user, who will need less available space for storing these packs, as they are more compact.
In order to allow a correct preparation of the food or beverage product from the food or beverage base ingredients which are comprised in these flexible packs or containers, identifiers comprising data for the process to be applied are provided: for example, document WO 2005/063091 A1 discloses a system for preparing a beverage departing from a container which can be a flexible bag comprising a plurality of coffee pouches, the container comprising an identifier with data for the brewing process to be applied to obtain the beverage. However, these identifiers can be damaged or can for example contain errors, in which case the system will not be able to correctly read the information and typically, a default brewing process will be applied, resulting in a non-optimised final product for the consumer. Moreover, this document describes that the identifier comprises an element which is detached from the container or which is provided separately from the container, this element comprising the data for the brewing process to be applied. The problem of these configurations is that the consumer needs to either torn and detach the element carrying the data or needs to introduce this separate element together with the container in the machine, which makes the process not comfortable from the user's point of view.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a system for preparing food or beverages in an optimised way departing from a flexible pack or container which comprises the data for the correct processing of these ingredients, such that the system is able to read the data in a reliable manner and minimising any possibility of errors. Moreover, it is also an object of the present invention to provide a system which is easy and comfortable to use for the consumer.
The present invention comes to provide a solution to the above-described needs, as it will be further explained. The invention also aims at other objects and particularly at the solution of other problems as will appear in the rest of the present description.